Tag: M55

Viewing report Travel to Tenerife Night 2 – Friday 5th July 2024

Started imaging at  10pm

Focus position main scope 12,327

Camera temperature -15℃

Ended imaging at  5:45am

Very calm night 0.7’ seeing and at the start little to no wind. The temperature was around 16-17℃ all night.

Started with Markarian’s chain again to gather better data than yesterday’s. Captured 15 x 300s tonight. I’ll do another final set tomorrow.

At 23:45 I moved on to M4 a globular cluster in Scorpius. I will continue with this again tomorrow night as I landed up with about 1.5 hours of usable data.

M4 Globular Cluster – stacked only

At around 2am I moved to M55 as M4 had got fairly low in the sky so I will come back to that tomorrow night. I did find there was too much time spent refocusing so I have now changed this to only as the temperature changes and at the start of a new image rather than every 30mins as well.

M55 Globular Cluster – Stacked only

I captured 3 hours on this lovely globular cluster.

Viewing report Travel to Tenerife Night 1 – Thursday 4th July 2024

Started imaging at 11pm

Focus position main scope 12,334

Camera temp -15℃

Ended imaging at 5:30am

Beautiful night slightly windy 0.9’ seeing at first but then changed dramatically later to around 2.2’

Markarian’s Chain suffered from many satellite trails, more so early on.

View from the iPad

12 x 300s so 1 hour of Markarian’s chain

By the time I started to image M39 the wind had started to pick up and I found even guiding at 60s was causing star trails.

M39 single 5 mins sub

So about 3am I started taking darks and then by 4:15am the seeing which was really the problem had settled down from 2.2 arc secs to 0.9! I went back and took 30 x 60s subs for M55 and then another 30 x 60s for M39 before heading off to bed.

M55 single 5 min sub

This is the final stacked and processed image

M55 – 33 x 5 min subs